Tropical Nature and cutures… and thoughts

Tag Archives: feeding

Last year I asked Dr. Martin Nyffeler, an arachnologist affiliated with the Department of Environmental Sciences of the University of Basel, to identify a photograph of a fishing spider from the Amazon region. Now I had the pleasure to have the picture published in the paper “Fish Predation by Semi-Aquatic Spiders: A Global Pattern” in the international scientific journal PLOS ONE (Public Library of Science) by Dr. Martin Nyffeler and Dr. Bradley Pusey. Dr. Nyffeler is specialized in the feeding ecology of spiders. The article is an extensive review paper on fish predation by spiders.

I was happy to have extended the record of the fish-eating species of Trechalea for the lower Amazon region in Brazil. The map shows few records of fish-eating spiders in the Amazon region, which is probably due to the scant scientific collecting. Curiously there is no record south of the Amazon river.

Supporting Information (File S1): Detailed Reports Description (by Martin Nyffeler): “# 59) – Around 1980, Jacques Jangoux (Belém Area, Brazil) took a photo of a Trechalea sp. eating a small fish on the bank of the Rio Maicuru river, tributary of the Amazon coming down from the Guiana Highlands in Para State, Brazil (Fig. 5D). This incidence was observed in the midst of tropical rainforest where slowly running water with pools of standing water between rocks occurred (Jacques Jangoux, pers. comm.). The spider was identified by Antonio Brescovit, Hubert Höfer, Adalberto Santos, and Estevam L. Cruz da Silva to be a Trechalea sp. Melanie Stiassny and Richard Vari identified the fish as a species in the order Characiformes. The fish was ~1.8 times as long as the spider.”

Jacques Jangoux

Well-documented photography of tropical nature and cultures often with an ecological perspective, mostly of Africa and of Latin America. Everyday tribal life, with anthropological documentation if available.
My website presents galleries of photographs, many oriented toward the educational market, on tropical biomes and traditional cultures. Often the identification has been provided by a specialist.
My personal goals are to enjoy nature and contact with local people, photograph what I enjoy, and selling it by necessity (to fulfill the first two goals, and to sustain my family)